I read in the paper today that Joanna Lumley believes that the house she used to live in was haunted. On her first day there an ancient removal man leaned his face very close to hers and said "Leave this place!" But when she went out to the removal truck the man was not there. I wonder if he was just employed by the removal firm to drum up more business. Sure Lumley had just moved and they'd got a job, but if they could persuade her to move again immediately then they'd be quids in.
She also heard footsteps, saw someone walking past her window which was too high above the ground to walk past and once at night saw a freshly dug grave in her garden that was gone in the morning. Most of these things, from what I gather were witnessed only be her. Certainly all the ones involving apparitions. I'm not for a second suggestion that Lumley might be a mental who just imagined all these things. After all it is much more probable that she is just susceptable to being contacted by the dead, due to her artistic sensitivity.
She felt she was being forced out of the place by the ghosts, yet when she put the place up for sale she was showing some people around and when she showed them the pantry (which was normally clean and insect free) it was full of bluebottles. The family left, terrified by the insects (and who wouldn't be) and when Lumley looked in the pantry again there was no sign of the flies. That's tough if even ghost insects are haunting you. The inhabitants of the next world must hate Joanna Lumley. Perhaps they feel she should have stopped Absolutely Fabulous after the second series before it all started getting a bit stretched and desperate.
But wait, if the ghosts wanted Lumley to leave, why did they mess things up when the other family were looking round the house. They should have kept quiet. The ghosts seem to have been confused. Maybe the human ghosts hated Lumley, but the ghouls from the insect world wanted her to stay. Perhaps insects stay being stupid once they are dead and are thus unable to follow any kind of plot or plan. I expect the human ghosts were furious with the bluebottle ghosts, but what were they going to do about it. The bluebottles were presumably already dead and beyond punishment. Even if they weren't they were just bluebottles and not really going to be able to understand that they were being chastised anyway. (still maybe that explains that strange fly I saw on the train at the end of August. It was probably a ghost. I knew there was something odd about it. It was trying to scare me off the train. Obviously not trying that hard or it would have been joined by some mates, who were able to buzz around in my face. But just freak me out a bit. Maybe just to make me move to another seat. It was a phantom. It all makes sense now).
Lumley went down to the cellar of her house and said "We're leaving!" and was rewarded with the scent of a thousand roses - though how she was able to calculate the number of these invisible (again presumably ghostly) flowers is not explained. Is it too much to think that even flowers can come back as ghosts? Or if you have accepted that insects can be spectres is it stupid to think that this power is not also accessible to the plant kingdom? Can bacteria come back from the dead (only to be visible to people with microscopes who I suspect would have difficultly telling them apart from their living brethren - unless the ghost bacteria were able to form themselves into the word "Wooooh!"
Lumley finally sold the house, thus passing the problem on to some other poor idiot. She must have been delighted.
But the Sunday Times reports that the new occupant has lived there for two years and experienced nothing unusual at all. She says, "Maybe the ghosts liked Joanna more than us." Yes, that seems the most likely explanation. I am scratching my head thinking of any other possible reason that the ghosts appeared to one person and not anyone else and it can only be because the ghosts liked her.
That's why they were trying to scare her away all the time. The bluebottle ghosts were the only ones who might possibly have liked her and wanted her to stay - but I personally think my idea that the flies were too stupid in life or death to understand what they were doing is correct and that the bluebottles were at best ambivalent about the actress.
If anything the ghosts hated Lumley -from the beginning - and wanted her out. I don't know what she's done to deserve this, but if I was Joanna Lumley I wouldn't be looking forward to being dead. She's going to be shunned by the entire ghoul community.
